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“ODF Alliance” formed to support OpenDocument format

A new "alliance" has formed to promote the OpenDocument format, used by …

A consortium of companies and organizations have banded together to form the "ODF Alliance," a group dedicated to promoting the office software file format first implemented by OpenOffice.org. The alliance consists of more than 35 members from various countries around the world. It includes companies such as Red Hat, IBM, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and Corel, and governmental organizations such as the American Library Association and the Information and Communications Technology council for the city of Vienna.

The OpenDocument file format was formed by the industry consortium OASIS, a group headed by Sun Microsystems, and was based on OpenOffice.org's native file format. OpenOffice.org is itself an open-sourced version of Star Office, the proprietary office suite that Sun purchased when it acquired the German company Star Division in 1999. The idea behind OpenDocument was to use a text-based XML format (compressed in a zip file to conserve disk space) in order to make it easy for other products to interoperate with it. The specification was finalized in 2005 and OpenOffice.org was the first software suite to support it. Other projects, such as KOffice, AbiWord, and IBM Workplace are adding support for the ODF format, either natively or through plug-in format translators.

In today's highly networked world, it turns out that operability is a very useful thing to have, which is why Microsoft decided that they would also jump on the XML bandwagon, introducing a new XML-based file format (.docx) for Office 2003. Not only that, but the company is planning to make the next version of the Office XML format the default for Office 2007 (formerly known as Office 12). This means that when users of Office 2007 go to save a file, they will automatically save in .docx, not .doc.

While most people don't consider file formats to be terribly exciting, the question of which format to adopt led to an increasingly dramatic series of announcements from the government of Massachusetts. In January 2005, the government approved Office XML 2003 as an appropriate file format, then in September of that year reversed their decision, stating that Office XML was unacceptable and that only OpenDocument and PDF files would be allowed. They went back again in November, stating that they were "very pleased" with Microsoft's submission of Office XML to the ECMA standards body, and that they were "optimistic that Office Open XML will meet our new standards for acceptable open formats." The champion of ODF in Massachusetts, CIO Peter Quinn, then suddenly announced his resignation in January. This announcement was followed with an assurance from Quinn's former boss that their position on ODF "remained unchanged" and that they were still committed to supporting that format.

Confused yet? The so-called "controversy" over the ODF switch has generated an unbelievable amount of press, and various groups are now busy pushing governments worldwide to switch over to the ODF format. This new "alliance" joins the groups SpreadOpenDocument.org, the OpenDocument Fellowship, and the "Friends of OpenDocument" in their quest to promote the format. My own inbox is now slowly filling up with pro-ODF announcements and press releases. The push seems overtly political, as evidenced by the rhetoric used by the ODF Alliance:

As documents and services are increasingly transformed from paper to electronic form, there is growing recognition that governments and their constituents may not be able to access, retrieve and use critical records, information and documents in the future.

This kind of "digital doomsaying" does not seem to me to be a realistic concern. Firstly, the older Microsoft Office formats have long since been reverse-engineered, by OpenOffice.org and others. Secondly, Microsoft has always provided free viewers for these formats. Lastly, and most importantly, the new Office XML specifications are freely available for anyone to download and Microsoft offers perpetual, royalty-free licenses to use them. I have argued before that people who consider this to be yet another "battle of the formats" are largely missing the point. Microsoft actually wants its new format to be as open as possible, so that an ecosystem of custom, third-party applications add value to the core product.

And there is another thing to consider. How many people actually use ODF right now? Corel, ostensibly a member of the ODF Alliance, recently announced that it would not be adding ODF support to its WordPerfect Office suite of products, citing lack of consumer demand:

"The company has no plans, immediate or future, to support the OpenDocument XML-based format brought to the spotlight by Sun Microsystems and open-source developers. Our commitment is to offer very pro-active compatibility in the industry for those file formats that are relevant," said Richard Carriere, Corel's general manager for office productivity. Carriere points to market data from analysis firm NPD, which he says gives WordPerfect 95 percent of the market for non-Microsoft word processors—in other words, nineteen-twentieths of the remaining five percent of the market. This gives OpenOffice, StarOffice, and whatever else remains of the word processor market, a collective share of less than three tenths of a percentage point.

So is all the fuss about OpenDocument much ado about nothing? I could argue that, but the very fact that I took the time to write a news article about the formation of the ODF Alliance proves that the story is at very least newsworthy. There are legitimate concerns raised by ODF proponents about public accessibility of information in a DRM-laden age. However, this is a much larger and more complex issue than simply "the world versus Microsoft" which is, unfortunately, what many of these arguments wind up sounding like.